Byronic Hero / Literature

Byronic Heroes in literature.

---

• Marie Corelli liked Lord Byron and was a friend of his widow Belle. Her best-known Byronic hero is probably Theos Alwyn from Ardath, a poet who Rages Against The Heavens and does Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter in fine style, until he redeems himself through his Or Was It a Dream? adventures and joining with his Twin Flame, Edris, "God's Maiden".
• Ferdinando Falkland from Caleb Williams qualifies. In his younger days, Falkland is a highly attractive, passionate, intelligent, and sophisticated man. He often muses on the injustices of life, and how to correct them. He is intensely committed to living out his chivalric ideals and behave as a modern knight. Then he murders someone. Post-murder Falkland is haunted by his crimes and full of guilt and self-hatred, but nonetheless determined to defend his name, even to the point of self-destruction. He even wanders out to cliffs in stormy weather.
• Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. Angry, brooding, and confused, but he secretly doesn't want to be any of those things. His cynicism and his past, unfortunately, hold him back.
• Lord Byron is the Trope Namer and used this character often (in fact, it is said that Byron himself is a real-life model for the trope):
  • His semi-autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage contains one of the earliest Byronic heroes to be actually named as such.
  • Straight from the horse's mouth, Byron's description of Conrad, the protagonist of The Corsair, provides the general essence of the character:
    He knew himself a villain—but he deem'd
    The rest no better than the thing he seem'd;
    And scorn'd the best as hypocrites who hid
    Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.
    He knew himself detested, but he knew
    The hearts that loath'd him, crouch'd and dreaded too.
    Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt
    From all affection and from all contempt:
• Valraven Palindrake in The Chronicles of Magravandias. He takes a step into Villain Protagonist territory for a while when he's possessed, but considering how hard he fights against it, he still comes out of it as heroic as the series allows. Played with in that the reader knows all about his Dark and Troubled Past, but his second wife doesn't.
• The Count of Monte Cristo: The Count, a man so obsessed with revenge that no means of ensuring his enemies' destruction is too heinous for him to consider. It's superficially lampshaded early on when someone remarks that he looks an awful lot like the incarnation of Lord Ruthven, a fictional character based on Lord Byron himself.
• Stavrogin in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons is a particularly nasty deconstruction; it's lampshaded early in the book that this character type was common in Russian literature (and society) at the time.
• Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of literature is that, while the Public Domain Character Don Juan is usually written as a selfish, haughty, shameless womanizer and fits this trope to a tee, Lord Byron's version of the character doesn't. The hero of Byron's mock epic, Don Juan, is not at all villainous or malicious but easily manipulated and misunderstood.
• Raistlin Majere of the Dragonlance books fits this trope perfectly. He's arrogant, ruthless, cynical, emotionally troubled, and ultimately evil. He's also highly intelligent, strong-willed, and capable of extraordinary bravery.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Harry Dresden is an interesting subversion of this, in that the books suggest that much of the magical community sees him like this - at least, the ones who don't know him well personally. The fact that the books are in first-person, and therefore we get to see his (often hilarious and self-deprecating) inner monologue, tends to take away the 'dark and mysterious' image. That, and his penchant for cracking wise at all of the wrong moments.
  • Dresden's best frenemy, crime lord John Marcone, can be viewed in this light. The book "Death Masks" reveals that he bases his style of "doing business," which involves keeping collateral damage to an absolute minimum and punishing harshly any criminals who try to operate in Chicago without his go-ahead, on guilt over a young girl taking a bullet that was meant for him in his younger days, leaving her in a coma. He provides for her medical care, reads to her, and even arranges to have the Shroud of Turin stolen in an attempt to heal her, all while running what is implied to be the largest organized-crime empire in America.
• Elric of Melnibone from The Elric Saga is a weak and frail albino, heir of the Vestigial Empire of the Melniboneans, who unlike most others of his race, struggles with his conscience. Because of his introspective self-loathing of Melnibonéan traditions, his subjects find him a weak ruler. On the other side, he's a powerful sorcerer and has the BFS ever (which happens to also eat souls), and is the Eternal Champion destined to restore Balance to the Earth and allow the powers of Law a chance to create a better future world. All these things bring him as much angst as you would expect.
• Dean Priest of the Emily of New Moon series embodies a number of these character traits. He's well-educated and charismatic, but his disabilities have also made him cynical, bitter, and rather self-destructive. He travels often, which makes him a bit of a self-imposed exile. He is a loner. He is self-interested to a degree, but can also be selfless when he wants to be. LM Montgomery also gives him lots of Mr. Rochester parallels, who is himself a Byronic hero.
• Empire of the Vampire: Gabriel de León is the greatest among the Silversaints of the Ordo Argent, a prodigy with the blade whose faith in God once burned so strong upon his skin it burned the eyes from the sockets of any vampire who beheld it. He is also currently a broken shell of a man, addicted to both sanctus and alcohol whose faith in God, as well as everything else, has been thoroughly shattered. He now prefers solitude, walks his own path and only cares about avenging himself upon the Dead who took everything away from him.
• The title character of Eugene Onegin can be both seen as an example, a parody, and a deconstruction. While he fits the mold in his cynical, self-destructive nature, he has more than a little of the Upper-Class Twit in him and is kind of ineffectual compared to similar characters. Lampshaded when Tatiana, Eugene's love interest, visits his library, understands that he has been invoking Romantic tropes when dealing with her, and asks herself: "Isn't he a parody?"^note Onegin originates from the character type of superfluous man, which can be seen as the way the Byronic hero developed in Russian literature based on the Russian society of the time.
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein:
  • Victor Frankenstein is a rather nice Byronic hero (who is not the monster!). His dangerous experiments with science and very troubled past make him qualify. His lack of compassion and responsibility for his creation, who desperately longed for his love and affection, makes him less redeemable than characters who are just misunderstood by society. He still does have some good traits though, such as his adoration of Elizabeth and his admiration of his friend Henry Clerval.
  • The Monster (or the Creature, as he is more often called in the novel) also qualifies. He is incredibly eloquent, brilliant, and persuasive in his best moments. He is also filled with characteristically Byronic anguish and despair due to being cut off from humanity as a result of his ugliness and unnatural birth (or creation, depending on how you look at it). He also murders everyone Victor ever loved. Some literary critics have interpreted the Creature as Victor's dark side.
• The Marquise of Rio Santo who rules the Gentlemen of the Night in Paul Féval's first hit Novel. Like The Vampyr he is a Byronic Villain, but an Anti-Villain.
• Michael Grant zigzags this trope with Caine Soren from the GONE series. In most books, he's simply a Jerkass Woobie villain who spends more time fulfilling the "Jerkass" side of that trope and arguably isn't worthy of sympathy at all (PLAGUE and GONE being the most potent examples). But in HUNGER and FEAR he is very much a Byronic hero, at least by the end of those installments.
• Gone with the Wind: Rhett Butler is a Tall, Dark, and Handsome man with a Dark and Troubled Past as a social outcast because of his unconventional opinions and actions, which often sound fine for the modern audience but awful for contemporary people. He's also morally ambiguous and quite opportunistic, but at least he admits this instead of being a hypocrite like most people around him and lives to his own interpretation of honor. He's also honorable and selfless to the people he cares for the most, and there are glimpses of his struggling conscience and occasional self-deprecation. Not to mention his self-destructive romance with equally impetuous Scarlett.
• The Great Gatsby: Jay Gatsby is maybe a sympathetic example. As a poor soldier, he falls hopelessly in love with beautiful socialite Daisy, who got married to her equal, a Jerk Jock Tom from old money, but he is determined to win her back. He would do - and does - anything for Daisy, who doesn't quite deserve it. Gatsby heavily idealized and romanticized Daisy and everything about her. Gradually, it becomes obvious that Gatsby's opulent wealth comes from smuggling and organized crime, but he's more compassionate than most "law-abiding" characters.
• Harry Potter provides a few examples.
  • Severus Snape is essentially a Byronic hero, as seen by a protagonist who sees much more of his negative qualities than his positive ones. He's an intelligent loner who's also completely insufferable, with a tragic backstory involving death and unrequited love which caused him to become embittered but also to go over to the side of good. Although he can be considered a Deconstruction since his actions and attitudes cause several problems at certain points and his emotions can make him highly unreasonable and hard to deal with.
  • Sirius is apparently quite clever and used to be very attractive before the strain of being locked up for twelve years for a crime he didn't commit ruined his good looks. Plus, bonus points for being slightly mad, a wee bit homicidal, and the last heir of a noble family from which he inherited a spooky old house. And both he and Snape have a flair for the melodramatic.
  • Harry himself in the last Book has come to share several traits of the Byronic Hero. He is charismatic, brooding has several intense emotions, that a times get the best of him. Is a rather intelligent young man, with prodigious amounts of Power and can be rather dramatic in his inner monologue. And of course his life has been a tragedy after tragedy with moments of respite between them.
• Grigoriy Aleksandrovich Pechorin in Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time is both a good example and possibly a deconstruction, being very smart and all the more miserable for it. Also, he's not even the protagonist as such and dies "off-screen". The author apparently intended to stretch the idea of the Byronic hero to its limits:
  "You will again tell me that a human being cannot be so wicked, and I will reply that if you can believe in the existence of all the villains of tragedy and romance, why wouldn't believe that there was a Pechorin?"
• The Hobbit: Thorin Oakenshield is a man who broke with his society in order to reclaim what he considered rightfully his, and he cheerfully accepts any hardships associated with this endeavor. He is also a charismatic leader and skilled harpist. However, he is also a prideful man, obsessive about his goals and greedy beyond belief (one of his followers outright states that Thorin will rather sit on a heap of gold and starve than give away a single coin). While he definitely is a hero in every sense, he is, as a human being (ahem Dwarf), a bit of a failure.
• In the Horatio Hornblower literature series, the title character is an honorable, dutiful, and humble man who acts with great courage under fire. However, he's also a brooding, melancholic mess whose humility verges on self-loathing, often shocked that people might care about him. Underneath his stoic facade is a world-class worrywart, and his courage under fire (in spite of his fears) is matched only by his cowardice in matters of the heart. He's also tone-deaf and never gets over his seasickness, much to his humiliation. In Commodore Hornblower his wife thoughtfully provides him with a copy of Byron's newly-published Childe Harold to while away the hours at sea. It is not to his taste:
  ''"Bombast and fustian," he said to himself, flipping through the pages.'
• Dom Claude Frollo from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A compassionate, fatherly person for most of his life, by the time the novel begins, he, while still brilliant, is isolated by his alchemical studies and ultimately doomed by his lust for Esmeralda.
• Nearly every hero in The Hunger Games falls under this category, really. The book series goes to great lengths to show how most of the characters are flawed and troubled.
• In Ivanhoe, Bois Guilbert is a perfect example. He is portrayed as a proud warrior and a passionate man who by his own admission holds nothing sacred save his given word. He gets infatuated with Rebecca, proceeds to kidnap her, and over the course of the story begins to respect and admire her fortitude. Yet unwittingly and tragically he ends up condemning her to a painful death at the stake. The most poignant scene of the book is the tournament to determine Rebecca's guilt where Bois Guilbert's immense pride and hatred for Wilfred of Ivanhoe contends with his desire to save Rebecca and make up for his mistake. The result? Unable to bring himself to strike and defeat Ivanhoe and indirectly seal Rebecca's fate and at the same time unable to bear the shame of accepting defeat at the hands of a wounded Ivanhoe, he dies, not a victim of any physical injury, but his own passions.
• Jane Eyre's Love Interest, Mr. Rochester is the heroic version. A taste for such heroes seems to have run in the Brontë family. He's dark and troubled, snarky and attractive despite his lack of good looks. Society frowns upon his ways, but deep down he's a good person who suffered horribly. Good that in his case Love Redeems.
• Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: Jonathan Strange ends up as one for a while, although he did have a heroic motive. It was lampshaded with Strange explaining that he picked up some of Lord Byron's style from hanging out with him. (Incidentally, the description of Byron himself is distinctly unimpressive; when Byron deliberately strikes a deep and brooding expression the narration compares it to the look of someone suffering indigestion.)
• Denethor from The Lord of the Rings is a bit of a Byronic hero: a beautiful, kingly, and powerful man with enough strength of will to grapple with Sauron through the palantír and not submit to him (which even Saruman couldn't manage). He's devoted to the good of Gondor, of which he considers himself the rightful lord; but when he comes to believe that Gondor is doomed (along with his own line of succession), he proudly commits suicide (and attempts to have his son killed alongside him) rather than surrender or be slain by Sauron's forces.
• Deconstructed by Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew. With his willingness to break social conventions and everyday morality For Science!, his contempt for the common person, and his seeming devotion to a broader ideal (he uses the phrase 'ours is a high and lonely destiny' when referring to himself), he first appears quite glamorous to his nephew Diggory — but then Diggory realizes that his uncle makes other people bear all the costs of his experiments, and comes to understand that Andrew is little more than an everyday bully. Furthermore, when the professor runs up against a genuine Übermensch later in the story, all his pretentions collapse and he ends up cutting quite a pathetic figure.
• No one in the Mistborn books is ever entirely sure whether Kelsier is a revenge-obsessed Glory Hound or a Well-Intentioned Extremist Guile Hero, but either way he's brilliant and so much larger than life that even his handwriting is legendary^note Legendarily bad, that is.
• Jace Wayland from The Mortal Instruments is handsome, brooding, charismatic, aloof, the list goes on. Also a Death Seeker and drenched in Mangst. He has a very strong personal presence, but he's not exactly a source of much positivity.
• Prince Vladimir from the Nightfall (Series) is very intelligent, sophisticated, and educated, but also self-centered and evil. Tristan also fits, including the time before he became a vampire.
• C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith is an Anti-Hero, but his sidekick Yarol is definitely Byronic. Unlike the ruggedly handsome Smith, Yarol is androgynously, uncannily beautiful, and feminine beauty in its extreme is explicitly stated to denote evil in the universe of the stories. While the reader never learns the details of Yarol's villainy, he willingly participates in human trafficking merely to pay for his space booze. At one point, Yarol's humanity is stripped away and he is transformed into a predatory beast-echo. When he is returned to his original state, it is surprisingly easy and the whole process seems to tax Yarol very little. Smith realizes that this is because Yarol had very little humanity to begin with.
• A modern example in John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows series: Petty Officer Mike "Ghost" Harmon, AKA Mike Jenkins, a former US Navy SEAL medically retired due to multiple injuries who, through a series of coincidences and perfectly-rational decisions in response to them, thwarts three major terrorist attacks in the course of a few months and becomes the millionaire lord of a clan of modern-day Vikings in the mountains of Georgia (the country, not the state). Mike (who constantly reminds those around him that he's not a good man) unabashedly considers himself a rapist at heart but holds himself to a strict Warrior Code while channeling his baser urges into heavy BDSM. Any time he comes across a man who doesn't restrain his darker nature, things get nasty. At the same time, he often shows a surprisingly compassionate side, especially to girls that he and his Keldara warriors have rescued from sex traffickers.
• Satan himself, from Paradise Lost, is perhaps the grandfather of this trope. Satan is an exceptional, extremely charismatic, and deeply flawed creature who rebels against his society (Heaven) and grapples with his morality.
• Ralph Touchett from The Portrait of a Lady is brooding, but completely devoted to his true love Isabelle Archer.
• The Sea Wolf: Wolf Larsen pings all the criteria listed in the page description. He doesn't hesitate to enforce his beliefs on his world (defined by his ship) and is something of a Straw Nihilist with an extremely hedonistic worldview. He is also the Big Bad and is completely open about being an unrepentant asshole on his BEST days.
• In The Secret History, there's Henry Winter, college student, Renaissance Man, and Chessmaster extraordinaire. By the end of the book, he has organized and carried out an ancient Greek Dionysian ritual, killed one man by accident and one on purpose successfully kept himself and his friends from being arrested, and says that he is finally happy because he can "live without thinking". Most of the school dislikes or hates him, his few friends admire him, and one falls in love with him. He likes dead languages and growing roses. He also kills himself, and the fallout of his various plots arguably ruins his friends' lives.
• The Silmarillion:
  • Fëanor started out as The Ace: a master linguist(he is essentially responsible for written Quenya as we know it) a master smith/artisan/craftsman (the greatest ever actually, crafted the eponymous Silmarils, created the Palantirs or at least their forerunners, so on and so forth), etc, however as non-extant slights and jealousy eat away at his good parts, leaving only his quick temper and arrogance behind, he went on to become at best the very picture of Nominal Hero at worst a kind of Visionary Villain who commits genocide, betrays long time friends and even family and even declares war and everlasting enmity on even gods should they get in his way.
  • Túrin Turambar was a great warrior and a prince, and he is the person who finally kills the dragon Glaurung. But when his father was captured by Morgoth, he was forced to live in exile. Túrin is serious and brooding, and his impulsiveness brings destruction to the people around him. For example, he accidentally kills his best friend Beleg when he mistakes Belen for an orc. Another example is that an elf princess named Finduilas falls in love with him (though he doesn't seem to notice) because he was handsome, with black hair and pale skin, but he fails to save her from Morgoth's army. But the most extreme example is that after Túrin finally slays the dragon Glaurung, he then commits suicide after learning that he accidentally married his sister Niënor (who also killed herself after this revelation).
• Simona Ahrnstedt's male protagonists are all Byronic when we first meet them. Seth in "Överenskommelser", Markus in "Betvingade" and Gabriel in "De skandalösa" all are charismatic men with a questionable reputation and a tragic past. But as these novels belong to the Romance Genre, they will of course find love and be redeemed.
• Peter David's Sir Apropos of Nothing, who only became a squire because he would be killed otherwise. He loathes long tales of heroic derring-do, and became a full-fledged villain for a while.
• The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has Diana Rossouw, who is intelligent but emotionally unstable, and values her freedom to the point of being callously amoral.
• For being a franchise with a truly expansive cast of characters, A Song of Ice and Fire collects a large amount:
  • Tyrion Lannister seems to be almost exactly this, sans the good looks. He is an extremely cunning, intelligent guy who will make a supreme politician if only someone gives him the credit he deserves. The tragedy of his life is that in a world of Beauty Equals Goodness, it's very difficult for him to achieve the power or he longs for, and he's cast aside by his own father and the woman he loved was horribly taken away from him because she was a commoner. Since he sides with his family, the supposed bad guys, he's an Anti-Villain whose actions throughout the first part of the series help further the cause of House Lannister, and when he acts ruthless is merely out of pragmatism. He's eventually getting darker and more cynical after discovering his commoner wife was not a prostitute hired by his brother Jaime for him, and he murdered his father for what he did to her. Since then he has defected his family and he's siding with the Targaryen, following his path of revenge.
  • His older brother Jaime Lannister is one as well. He's by reputation the most handsome man in Westeros and one of the most dangerous as well. He starts off presented as rather villainous, brash, cynical, and prone to reckless behavior such as slaughtering some of Ned's guard in response to his brother Tyrion's kidnapping by Ned's wife, not to mention his Bodyguard Betrayal of King Aerys, which is still frowned upon years after and his incestuous passion for his twin sister Queen Cersei. Then the third book reveals he has his share of emotional baggage which mostly consist of guilt for the death of Rhaegar's children and having lied about Tyrion's wife being a prostitute. After having lost his sword hand and having met warrior girl Brienne, he's actively moving to more honorable behavior, though at his own interpretation of the rules.
  • Somebody who goes to great lengths to both downplay and, therefore, "hide" exactly how mad he is (by Westerosi standards both in love and philosophy), just how bad he is (by just about anybody's standards in every category you could choose) and how incredibly bleeding dangerous just knowing him is, is Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish. From his Start of Darkness to his justification that there's no other way for him to win than by completely changing the game in his favor, yeah... He's what happens when a Byronic type goes really seriously dark on everybody for semi-justifiable reasons. Also, he thinks in very Braavosi terms in a place that quite clearly doesn't — and, consciously uses that to his advantage. Which, should surprise nobody: the Fingers form the closest point to Braavos in continental Westeros, his family was originally from there and they have always had access to fishing boats.
  • The Targaryens by themselves have produced a great deal of them:
    • Rhaegar Targaryen seems to have been one. Rhaegar repeatedly stated to have had "melancholy eyes" that matched his brooding nature and was a charismatic wise prince who played the harp and liked spending time alone. It also seems that his path was generally driven by a prophecy he read as a boy, and to keep faithful to it, he became one of Westeros's finest swords. People expected him to become a great king, but he lost his life in a war for the woman he loved, whom he couldn't have since he was already married and she was about to marry his cousin. He was also born under inauspicious circumstances (the Tragedy at Summerhall) and often mused about it. And most of all the true meaning of his actions is still shrouded in mystery and a font of speculations in-universe and out.
    • Prince Daemon Targaryen was a prince, a pirate, and a rogue, and lived and loved dangerously. His enemies at court were terrified of him for his mercurial and ruthless nature and tried to keep him away from the throne when his brother King Viserys lacked male heirs. After being passed over for the Iron Throne once, he flew off to conquer the Stepstones with his dragon and made himself a petty pirate king until he got bored of fighting. In the years he led the City Guard, he was fond of visiting brothels and gambling pits, consorting with lowlifes, and generally hanging out with all manner of scum. He was also capable of great bravery and strength and died fighting the greatest dragon alive in a Taking You with Me gambit.
    • Brynden "Bloodraven" Rivers, bastard son of King Aegon IV, was the most important political figure during his time at King's Landing and most certainly the greatest Master of Whisperers to have ever served the Iron Throne. But he was a very controversial guy: rumored to be a sorcerer (and indeed he was, since he could skinchange into his crows and disguise himself with glamours) who controlled the kingdom with his crows and suppressed the Blackfyre Rebellion in blood. He and his famously beautiful half-sister Shiera Seastar were lovers, though she refused to actually marry him and was desired by their half-brother Aegor "Bittersteel" Rivers, with whom Bloodraven had a lifelong rivalry and shared hatred. Bloodraven's ruthless actions to keep the Targaryens on the throne eventually earned him a one-way ticket to the Wall. But even there he managed to become Lord Commander of the Night's Watch until he disappeared Beyond the Wall. It's revealed he didn't disappear - he instead became a powerful half-weirwood figure in a cave with the Children of the Forest and he's still watching Westeros and his descendants.
  • Oberyn Martell is Lord Byron meets Inigo Montoya. A handsome, highly skilled, intelligent, and charismatic man who lives and loves dangerously, cares nothing for what other people think of him (it helps that he's from a part of Westeros that follows different, more liberal customs), and utterly driven by an obsession with avenging his sister's brutal murder that results in his own demise, only for Oberyn to get the last laugh by poisoning his killer. Oberyn is also modeled after Byron in the details, in ways that other Byronic hero's often aren't. Both men are bisexual. Byron had 3 children (well, 2 confirmed and 1 suspected), all daughters, and Oberyn's 8 children are likewise all daughters.
• Jacen Solo/Darth Caedus in Star Wars Legends. Long before his descent into darkness in Legacy of the Force, Jacen had already begun adopting a somewhat cynical yet also introspective and philosophical outlook on the universe, especially during Traitor, having come to the conclusion with his mentor Vergere that there was no light side or dark side. It was all about the intent behind the power, deciding to have an all-encompassing unconditional love for the universe, even going as far to find Zonoma Sekot, the living planet which was the key to the Yuuzhan Vong War ending without genocide. However, this selflessness led him to become a Well-Intentioned Extremist in trying to prevent widespread anarchy, alienating his family.
• Gully Foyle in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, a The Count of Monte Cristo set in a future where people can teleport, starts out as this: he lives entirely to take revenge on the ship that declined to rescue him from his own crippled spacecraft (not the crew, just the ship; he's not that bright) and stops at nothing to do so, including raping perhaps the one completely likable character in the whole book. However, he gradually becomes more of a traditional hero and a messiah of sorts.
• The Sunne in Splendour: Sharon Kay Penman's novel gives Richard III a Byronic Historical Hero Upgrade, albeit one where his is The Fettered rather than The Unfettered. Early in his life, the quiet, moral and brooding Richard contrasts with his extroverted older brother Edward IV. His cousin observes that Richard is both a moralist and an idealist, which is a difficult combination. In the novel, he is not the monster of Shakespeare, but if he thinks he is in the right, he will act ruthlessly to protect his family and his honor. He is willing to seize the throne through legal means, but he does not murder his nephews. After losing his wife and son, however, Richard falls into depression and becomes a death seeker, dying tragically and being libeled by his more cowardly enemy, Henry Tudor.
• Another Bronte example. Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has a rare female example in the titular tenant, Helen Graham. She's reclusive, broody, an outcast to society because of her outrageous actions (by 19th-century English social norms), is plagued by her Dark and Troubled Past, and is really cold towards the narrator and her Love Interest, Gilbert Markham. That said, she's very determined and has her understandable reasons for why she committed taboos.
• Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He is dark, moody, passionate, and his values are rather revolutionary.
• Edward Cullen of Twilight is lonely but can't stand how much he wants Bella Swan and her blood.
  Edward: Beautiful? This is the skin of a killer, Bella.
• Lord Ruthven of the novella The Vampyre, as well as the Lord Ruthven from a novel by Lady Lamb above, are both based on Byron — they are (like their more famous literary descendant, Count Dracula), however, examples of Byronic villains rather than heroes.
• Captain John Rumford in post-apocalyptic Victoria is a very Romantic character, a tragic, passionate soldier-intellectual, and revolutionist who will make any sacrifice and do whatever he has to in order to bring about his reactionary utopia. And even what measures of success he does obtain do not seem to bring him any lasting happiness.
• Irial from Wicked Lovely, although he definitely has redeeming qualities: selflessness and his love for Niall being the most prominent.
• In Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights Villain Protagonist Heathcliff goes to extreme lengths to ruin the lives of both the Linton family and the Earnshaw family as revenge for his lost love Cathy, at one point even kidnapping Cathy's daughter Catherine and forcing her to marry his son. Adored by millions of people throughout the world for the power and intensity of his passion despite being cruel and vindictive, and not fitting the Jerk with a Heart of Gold trope.